Books: Rosie and Willie

W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM AND THE QUEST FOR FREEDOM
by ROBERT LORIN CALDER 324 pages. Doubleday. $8.95.

Robert Lorin Calder, an English teacher at the University of Saskatchewan, has written the kind of academic dissertation that is doomed to
sit on the shelf as if in a jar, pickled. But the book's appendices,
not just one but two, are inflamed with gossipy life.

The body of the book pursues through every novel, play and story,
good, bad or silly, that Maugham ever wrote  Calder's all-purpose
insight that Maugham was preoccupied with the escape from bondage.
Calder has dis covered, for example, that "examined...